4 - “Where, then, shall we place the hero of the wilderness?”: William Apess's Eulogy on King Philip and doctrines of racial destiny

Summary

Between 1829 and 1836 William Apess was highly visible as an activist, lecturer, and author. A Methodist minister and mixed-blood Pequot, Apess was an outspoken advocate for Indian reform - education, christianization, temperance, and equal treatment under the law. Long a controversial figure in his native New England, Apess also briefly drew the eyes of the nation. Until just recently, however, Apess's writings were scattered in obscure repositories across the country and largely unknown to most contemporary scholars. Now, with the 1992 publication of Barry O'Connell's indispensable On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot, Apess's five published texts are widely available and are described as “the most considerable [body of writing produced] by any Native American before the 1840s” (xxxix). Largely due to O'Connell's broadspectrum recovery of his work, Apess is becoming an important reference point amid efforts to retrieve occulted histories.

But despite the many vital contributions to Apess scholarship, there are still issues that make one worry. Even now, the most wellmeaning recovery efforts are at times inflected by an Anglo- American view of history that carries a racial destiny - a version of the national creation story in which whites prevail, blacks are rescued from slavery, and Indians vanish. More specifically, since the early nineteenth century, the historical “fate” of Native Americans has been shaped by “vanishing American” ideology (the complex, pervasive nineteenth-century popular and scientific belief that indigenous Americans were a “dying race”). Accordingly, American Indians who resisted empire have been read as variants of the savage hero: noble and valiant but ultimately doomed.